Lorenzo Snow (April 3, 1814 – October 10, 1901) was an American religious leader who served as the fifthpresident of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) from 1898 to his death. Snow was the last president of the LDS Church in the nineteenth century and the first in the twentieth.

Despite the labor required on the farm, the Snow family valued learning and saw that each child had educational opportunities. Snow received his final year of education at Oberlin College, which was originally founded by two Presbyterian ministers. Snow later made his living as a school teacher when not engaged in church service.

While living in Kirtland in 1837, Snow was called to serve a short mission in Ohio, traveling "without purse or scrip." He recorded that relying on the kindness of others for his meals and lodging was difficult for him, as he had always had sufficient means to care for himself. When he returned to Kirtland in 1838, Snow found Smith's followers in turmoil over the failure of the Kirtland Safety Society. Snow and the members of his extended family chose to move to Missouri in the summer of 1838 and join the Latter Day Saints settling near Far West. Snow became seriously ill with a fever, and was nursed for several weeks by his sister Eliza.

On his recovery, Snow left for a second mission to Illinois and Kentucky in the fall of 1838. He served there through February 1839, when he learned that the Latter Day Saints had been expelled from their settlements in Missouri. He traveled home by way of his former mission area in Ohio. He was again taken ill and was cared for by members of the church. He remained in Ohio, preaching and working with church members until the fall of 1839. During the school year of 1839–40, Snow taught in Shalersville, Ohio. He sent money to his family, which had by then settled in Nauvoo, Illinois; he joined them in May 1840.

Shortly after he arrived in Nauvoo, Snow was asked to serve a mission in England. After an unpleasant sea voyage from New York City, Snow met with some of the members of the Quorum of the Twelve who had opened the British Mission in 1839, including Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, and Parley P. Pratt. Snow worked briefly in the Manchester area, and had success in Birmingham, where he baptized people in Greet's Green and organized a branch in Wolverhampton. Snow was assigned to preside over church members in London. During his administration, church membership in the city increased from approximately 100 to 400 members. He was released from his mission by Pratt, who by then was president of an expanding European Mission. Snow arrived home on April 12, 1843, and was accompanied by a shipload of 250 British converts.

After visiting with his family, Snow again secured a teaching position for the winter, teaching at Lima, Illinois, thirty miles from Nauvoo. In late spring 1844, he returned to Ohio, preaching and baptizing new converts and distributing recent church publications to members. He was working in Cincinnati, Ohio, when he learned of the assassination of Joseph Smith. Snow closed his Ohio mission and promptly returned to Nauvoo.

Snow and his family, with wagons and livestock, joined a group of emigrants and moved across the Mississippi River into Iowa in February 1846. On the way west, Snow again became ill and the family stopped at Mt. Pisgah, Iowa. Three Snow children were born at the Mormon refugee settlement, but none of them survived. Snow was called to preside over the church organization in Mt. Pisgah and actively raised money to assist the bands of emigrants in their move west. The Snow family arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in 1848.

Shortly after his call to the Twelve, Snow left on a mission to Italy and French-speakingSwitzerland. He later sent missionaries under his direction to India (1849–52). Snow was directly involved in missionary work in Italy and Switzerland, and also preached in Malta. He had planned to visit India, but various circumstances prevented this journey.

Snow began his mission in Italy among the Waldensians, an ancient sect of Christians who inhabited the Piedmont Valleys in the Alps. (Waldensianism predates the Reformation by several hundred years and is completely separate from Catholicism.) Snow and his companions Joseph Toronto, Thomas Stenhouse, and Jabez Woodard initially had very little success in converting the Waldensians to Mormonism. However, after healing a three-year-old boy named Joseph Gay, they began to find converts. In the end, more than 150 Waldensians converted to Mormonism, and 70 eventually emigrated to Utah.

Snow also discovered the poem "The Mountain Christians" while preaching among the people of the Piedmont Valleys; it was later modified and re-titled as the hymn "For The Strength of the Hills." The song has remained in the LDS Church's hymnal for more than 100 years.[5][6][7][8]

In 1850, Snow wrote a pamphlet entitled "The Voice of Joseph" to advance missionary work in the Italian mission. He was unable to find anyone in Italy to translate it so sent it to Orson Pratt, then the president of the British Mission, who eventually found someone in Paris to translate it. In 1851, Snow published a pamphlet entitled "The Italian Mission"[9] about the church's missionary efforts in Italy. It was published in London.

In January 1851, Snow went to England and found a person there whom he hired to translate the Book of Mormon into Italian.[10]

The efforts of missionaries under Snow, especially the ones he sent to Turin, inspired an article attacking the Mormon missionaries for undermining the Roman Catholic Church in the Turinese paper, L'Armonia. Snow and his successors were unsuccessful in the cities also due to opposition to their activities by the government of Camillo Cavour.[citation needed]

On his return to Utah Territory, Snow founded a society called the Polysophical Society to conduct study into the various aspects of human knowledge. He encouraged church members of all ages to join and some view this organization as a predecessor of the church's Young Men's Mutual Improvement Association.

In 1853, under the direction of church president Brigham Young, Snow brought additional settlers to Brigham City, Utah. Settlement had begun on a limited scale at this site under the name "Box Elder." Snow changed the name and moved the community towards living up to its name. He was also a key backer of the Brigham City Cooperative, which was the inspiration for ZCMI and other cooperatives.

Some[who?] accused Snow of engineering the 1901 election of Thomas Kearns, his friend and a wealthy Catholic, to the United States Senate. However, it may have been a shrewd decision to help Utah retain its statehood by electing a non-Mormon to represent Utah.[12]

Snow was first elected to the Utah Territorial Council, the upper house of the territorial legislature, in 1855. Originally, he represented Weber County along with Lorin Farr. At that point, Weber County encompassed all of Utah north of Davis County. By 1857, Box Elder County, Cache County and the short-lived Malad County were added to the area Snow and Farr represented. In 1863, Weber and Box Elder Counties were broken off from Cache County (Malad County was by then defunct) and made a single-representative district, with Snow remaining as their lone council member. (Ezra T. Benson had replaced Farr as the other councilor in 1861; he was a resident of Cache County and remained the other councilor after the district was split.) In 1872, Snow became the president of the council. He held this position for through the end of 1881. In 1882, Snow remained a member of the council but he was succeeded as its president by Joseph F. Smith. In 1884, Snow was succeeded as a member of the council by Franklin S. Richards.[13]

Snow was the subject of a United States Supreme Court case regarding polygamy prosecutions under the Edmunds Act. In late 1885, Snow was indicted by a federal grand jury for three counts of unlawful cohabitation. According to his indictments, Snow had lived with more than one woman for three years. The jury delivered one indictment for each of these years, and Snow was convicted on each count. After conviction he filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus in the federal district court which convicted him. The petition was denied, but federal law guaranteed him an appeal to the United States Supreme Court. In Ex Parte Snow,[16] the Supreme Court invalidated Snow's second and third convictions for unlawful cohabitation. It found that unlawful cohabitation was a "continuing offense," and thus that Snow was at most guilty of one such offense for cohabiting continuously with more than one woman for three years.

The first notable action of Snow as president of the church was that he organized the First Presidency almost immediately after Wilford Woodruff's death, rather than waiting years as his predecessors had.

As he began his tenure as president, Snow had to deal with the aftermath of legal battles with the United States over the practice of plural marriage. Men engaging in plural marriage were still being arrested and confined in Utah. Some members of the LDS Church did not accept the 1890 Manifesto put forth by Woodruff, and there was a strong division of opinion on plural marriage even in the priesthood hierarchy of the church.

The LDS Church was also in severe financial difficulties, some of which were related to the legal problems over plural marriage. Snow approached this problem first by issuing short term bonds with a total value of one million dollars. This was followed by emphatic teaching on tithing. It was during Snow's presidency that the LDS Church adopted the principle of tithing—being interpreted as the payment of 10 percent of one's income—as a hallmark of membership. In 1899, Snow gave an address at the St. George Tabernacle in St. George, imploring the Latter-day Saints to pay tithes of corn, money or whatever they had in order to have sufficient rain.[17] Eventually, it rained in southern Utah.[17] For the remainder of his tenure, Snow emphasized tithing in his sermons and public appearances.[17] By April 1907, the members' practice of paying tithing had eliminated the church's debt.[17]

On March 31, 1900, Snow, along with the First Presidency, changed the policy of presidential succession.[18] Under the then-existing rules of presidential succession in the church, John Willard Young would have become the President of the Church when Snow died, as Snow was the only living person who had been ordained an apostle prior to Young.[19] Snow was 85 years old and in poor health, so it appeared to many that Young would be the next president of the church. However, many of the general authorities of the church felt that Young's succession to the presidency would be a disaster for the church.[19] Under the new policy, the new president of the church would no longer be the person who had been an ordained apostle the longest; rather, the new president of the church would be the person who had been a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles for the longest period of time.[18] Since Young had never been a member of the Quorum of the Twelve, he could not become the president of the church if Snow died. On April 5, 1900, the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve unanimously approved the new policy.[20]